Portnoy's Complaint

by Philip Roth

  Why not? What’s lost? What’s gained, however? Go ahead, you shackled and fettered son of a bitch, speak to her. She has an ass on her with the swell and the cleft of the world’s most perfect nectarine! Speak!

  “Hi”—softly, and with a little surprise, as though I might have met her somewhere before …

  “What do you want?”

  “To buy you a drink,” I said.

  “A real swinger,” she said, sneering.

  Sneering! Two seconds—and two insults! To the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for this whole city! “To eat your pussy, baby, how’s that?” My God! She’s going to call a cop! Who’ll turn me in to the Mayor!

  “That’s better,” she replied.

  And so a cab pulled up, and we went to her apartment, where she took off her clothes and said, “Go ahead.”

  My incredulity! That such a thing was happening to me! Did I eat! It was suddenly as though my life were taking place in the middle of a wet dream. There I was, going down at last on the star of all those pornographic films that I had been producing in my head since I first laid a hand upon my own joint … “Now me you,” she said, “—one good turn deserves another,” and, Doctor, this stranger then proceeded to suck me off with a mouth that might have gone to a special college to learn all the wonderful things it knew. What a find, I thought, she takes it right down to the root! What a mouth I have fallen into! Talk about opportunities! And simultaneously: Get out! Go! Who and what can this person be!

  Later we had a long, serious, very stirring conversation about perversions. She began by asking if I had ever done it with a man. I said no. I asked (as I gathered she wanted me to) if she had ever done it with another woman.

  “… Nope.”

  “… Would you like to?”

  “… Would you like me to?”

  “… Why not, sure.”

  “… Would you like to watch?”

  “… I suppose so.”

  “… Then maybe it could be arranged.”

  “… Yes?”

  “… Yes.”

  “… Well, I might like that.”

  “Oh,” she said, with a nice sarcastic edge, “I think you might.”

  She told me then that only a month before, when she had been ill with a virus, a couple she knew had come by to make dinner for her. After the meal they said they wanted her to watch them screw. So she did. She sat up on the bed with a temperature of 102, and they took off their clothes and went at it on the bedroom rug—“And you know what they wanted me to do, while they were making it?”

  “No.”

  “I had some bananas on the counter in the kitchen, and they wanted me to eat one. While I watched.”

  “For the arcane symbolism, no doubt.”

  “The what?”

  “Why did they want you to eat the banana?”

  “Man, I don’t know. I guess they wanted to know I was really there. They wanted to like hear me. Chewing. Look, do you just suck, or do you fuck, too?”

  The real McCoy! My slut from the Empire Burlesque—without the tits, but so beautiful!

  “I fuck too.”

  “Well, so do I.”

  “Isn’t that a coincidence,” I said, “us running into each other.”

  She laughed for the first time, and instead of that finally putting me at my ease, suddenly I knew—some big spade was going to leap out of the bedroom closet and spring for my heart with his knife—or she herself was going to go berserk, the laughter would erupt into wild hysterics—and God only knew what catastrophe would follow. Eddie Waitkus!

  Was she a call girl? A maniac? Was she in cahoots with some Puerto Rican pusher who was about to make his entrance into my life? Enter it—and end it, for the forty dollars in my wallet and a watch from Korvette’s?

  “Look,” I said, in my clever way, “do you do this, more or less, all the time …?”

  “What kind of question is that! What kind of shit-eating remark is that supposed to be! Are you another heartless bastard too? Don’t you think I have feelings too!”

  “I’m sorry. Excuse me.”

  But suddenly, where there had been fury and outrage, there were only tears. Did I need any more evidence that this girl was, to say the least, a little erratic psychologically? Any man in his right mind would surely then have gotten up, gotten dressed, and gotten the hell out in one piece. And counting his blessings. But don’t you see—my right mind is just another name for my fears! My right mind is simply that inheritance of terror that I bring with me out of my ridiculous past! That tyrant, my superego, he should be strung up, that son of a bitch, hung by his fucking storm-trooper’s boots till he’s dead! In the street, who had been trembling, me or the girl? Me! Who had the boldness, the daring, the guts, me or the girl? The girl! The fucking girl!

  “Look,” she said, wiping away the tears with the pillowcase, “look, I lied to you before, in case you’re interested, in case you’re writing this down or something.”

  “Yeah? About what?” And here he comes, I thought, my shvartze, out of the closet,—eyes, teeth, and razor blade flashing! Here comes the headline: ASST HUMAN OPPY COMMISH FOUND HEADLESS IN GO-GO GIRL’S APT!

  “I mean like what the fuck did I lie for, to you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, so I can’t tell you.”

  “I mean they didn’t want me to eat the banana. My friends didn’t want me to eat any banana. I wanted to.”

  Thus: The Monkey.

  As for why she did lie, to me? I think it was her way of informing herself right off—semiconsciously, I suppose—that she had somehow fallen upon a higher-type person: that pickup on the street notwithstanding, and the wholehearted suck in her bed notwithstanding—followed by that heart-stirring swallow—and the discussion of perversions that followed that … still, she really hadn’t wanted me to think of her as given over wholly to sexual excess and adventurism … Because a glimpse of me was apparently all it took for her to leap imaginatively ahead into the life that might now be hers … No more narcissistic playboys in their Cardin suits; no more married, desperate advertising executives in overnight from Connecticut; no more faggots in British warmers for lunch at Serendipity, or aging lechers from the cosmetics industry drooling into their hundred-dollar dinners at Le Pavilion at night … No, at long last the figure who had dwelled these many years at the heart of her dreams (so it turned out), a man who would be good to a wife and to children … a Jew. And what a Jew! First he eats her, and then, immediately after, comes slithering on up and begins talking and explaining things, making judgments left and right, advising her what books to read and how to vote, telling her how life should and should not be lived. “How do you know that?” she used to ask warily. “I mean that’s just your opinion.” “What do you mean opinion—it’s not my opinion, girlie, it’s the truth.” “I mean, is that like something everybody knows … or just you?” A Jewish man, who cared about the welfare of the poor of the City of New York, was eating her pussy! Someone who had appeared on educational TV was shooting off into her mouth! In a flash, Doctor, she must have seen it all—can that be? Are women that calculating? Am I actually a naïf about cunt? Saw and planned it all, did she, right out there on Lexington Avenue? … The gentle fire burning in the book-lined living room of our country home, the Irish nanny bathing the children before Mother puts them to bed, and the willowy ex-model, jet-setter, and sex deviant, daughter of the mines and mills of West Virginia, self-styled victim of a dozen real bastards, seen here in her Saint Laurent pajamas and her crushed-kid boots, dipping thoughtfully into a novel by Samuel Beckett … seen here on a fur rug with her husband, whom People Are Talking About, The Saintliest Commissioner of the City of New York … seen here with his pipe and his thinning kinky black Hebe hair, in all his Jewish messianic fervor and charm …

  What happened finally at Irvington Park: late on a Saturday afternoon I found myself virtually alone on the frozen lake with a darling fourteen-year-old shiksele
h whom I had been watching practicing her figure eights since after lunch, a girl who seemed to me to possess the middle-class charms of Margaret O’Brien—that quickness and cuteness around the sparkling eyes and the freckled nose—and the simplicity and plainness, the lower-class availability, the lank blond hair of Peggy Ann Garner. You see, what looked like movie stars to everyone else were just different kinds of shikses to me. Often I came out of the movies trying to figure out what high school in Newark Jeanne Crain (and her cleavage) or Kathryn Grayson (and her cleavage) would be going to if they were my age. And where would I find a shikse like Gene Tierney, who I used to think might even be a Jew, if she wasn’t actually part Chinese. Meanwhile Peggy Ann O’Brien has made her last figure eight and is coasting lazily off for the boathouse, and I have done nothing about her, or about any of them, nothing all winter long, and now March is almost upon us—the red skating flag will come down over the park and once again we will be into polio season. I may not even live into the following winter, so what am I waiting for? “Now! Or never!” So after her—when she is safely out of sight—I madly begin to skate. “Excuse me,” I will say, “but would you mind if I walk you home?” If I walked, or if I walk—which is more correct? Because I have to speak absolutely perfect English. Not a word of Jew in it. “Would you care perhaps to have a hot chocolate? May I have your phone number and come to call some evening? My name? I am Alton Peterson”—a name I had picked for myself out of the Montclair section of the Essex County phone book—totally goy I was sure, and sounds like Hans Christian Andersen into the bargain. What a coup! Secretly I have been practicing writing “Alton Peterson” all winter long, practicing on sheets of paper that I subsequently tear from my notebook after school and burn so that they won’t have to be explained to anybody in my house. I am Alton Peterson, I am Alton Peterson—Alton Christian Peterson? Or is that going a little too far? Alton C. Peterson? And so preoccupied am I with not forgetting whom I would now like to be, so anxious to make it to the boathouse while she is still changing out of her skates—and wondering, too, what I’ll say when she asks about the middle of my face and what happened to it (old hockey injury? Fell off my horse while playing polo after church one Sunday morning—too many sausages for breakfast, ha ha ha!)—I reach the edge of the lake with the tip of one skate a little sooner than I had planned—and so go hurtling forward onto the frostbitten ground, chipping one front tooth and smashing the bony protrusion at the top of my tibia.

  My right leg is in a cast, from ankle to hip, for six weeks. I have something that the doctor calls Osgood Shlatterer’s Disease. After the cast comes off, I drag the leg along behind me like a war injury—while my father cries, “Bend it! Do you want to go through life like that? Bend it! Walk natural, will you! Stop favoring that Oscar Shattered leg, Alex, or you are going to wind up a cripple for the rest of your days!”

  For skating after shikses, under an alias, I would be a cripple for the rest of my days.

  With a life like mine, Doctor, who needs dreams?

  Bubbles Girardi, an eighteen-year-old girl who had been thrown out of Hillside High School and was subsequently found floating in the swimming pool at Olympic Park by my lascivious classmate, Smolka, the tailor’s son …

  For myself, I wouldn’t go near that pool if you paid me—it is a breeding ground for polio and spinal meningitis, not to mention diseases of the skin, the scalp, and the asshole—it is even rumored that some kid from Weequahic once stepped into the footbath between the locker room and the pool and actually came out at the other end without his toenails. And yet that is where you find the girls who fuck. Wouldn’t you know it? That is the place to find the kinds of shikses Who Will Do Anything! If only a person is willing to risk polio from the pool, gangrene from the footbath, ptomaine from the hot dogs, and elephantiasis from the soap and the towels, he might possibly get laid.

  We sit in the kitchen, where Bubbles was working over the ironing board when we arrived—in her slip! Mandel and I leaf through back numbers of Ring magazine, while in the living room Smolka tries to talk Bubbles into taking on his two friends as a special favor to him. Bubbles’ brother, who in a former life was a paratrooper, is nobody we have to worry about, Smolka assures us, because he is off in Hoboken boxing in a feature event under the name Johnny “Geronimo” Girardi. Her father drives a taxi during the day, and a car for The Mob at night—he is out somewhere chauffeuring gangsters around and doesn’t get home until the early hours, and the mother we don’t have to worry about because she’s dead. Perfect, Smolka, perfect, I couldn’t feel more secure. Now I have absolutely nothing to worry about except the Trojan I have been carrying around so long in my wallet that inside its tinfoil wrapper it has probably been half eaten away by mold. One spurt and the whole thing will go flying in pieces all over the inside of Bubbles Girardi’s box—and then what do I do?

  To be sure that these Trojans really hold up under pressure, I have been down in my cellar all week filling them with quart after quart of water—expensive as it is, I have been using them to jerk off into, to see if they will stand up under simulated fucking conditions. So far so good. Only what about the sacred one that has by now left an indelible imprint of its shape upon my wallet, the very special one I have been saving to get laid with, with the lubricated tip? How can I possibly expect no damage to have been done after sitting on it in school—crushing it in that wallet—for nearly six months? And who says Geronimo is going to be all night in Hoboken? And what if the person the gangsters are supposed to murder has already dropped dead from fright by the time they arrive, and Mr. Girardi is sent home early for a good night’s rest? What if the girl has the syph! But then Smolka must have it too!—Smolka, who is always dragging drinks out of everybody else’s bottle of cream soda, and grabbing with his hand at your putz! That’s all I need, with my mother! I’d never hear the end of it! “Alex, what is that you’re hiding under your foot?” “Nothing.” “Alex, please, I heard a definite clink. What is that that fell out of your trousers that you’re stepping on it with your foot? Out of your good trousers!” “Nothing! My shoe! Leave me alone!” “Young man, what are you—oh my God! Jack! Come quick! Look—look on the floor by his shoe!” With his pants around his knees, and the Newark News turned back to the obituary page and clutched in his hand, he rushes into the kitchen from the bathroom—“Now what?” She screams (that’s her answer) and points beneath my chair. “What is that, Mister—some smart high-school joke?” demands my father, in a fury—“what is that black plastic thing doing on the kitchen floor?” “It’s not a plastic one,” I say, and break into sobs. “It’s my own. I caught the syph from an eighteen-year-old Italian girl in Hillside, and now, now, I have no more p-p-p-penis!” “His little thing,” screams my mother, “that I used to tickle it to make him go wee-wee—” “DON’T TOUCH IT NOBODY MOVE,” cries my father, for my mother seems about to leap forward onto the floor, like a woman into her husband’s grave—“call—the Humane Society—” “Like for a rabies dog?” she weeps. “Sophie, what else are you going to do? Save it in a drawer somewhere? To show his children? He ain’t going to have no children!” She begins to howl pathetically, a grieving animal, while my father … but the scene fades quickly, for in a matter of seconds I am blind, and within the hour my brain is the consistency of hot Farina.

  Tacked above the Girardi sink is a picture of Jesus Christ floating up to Heaven in a pink nightgown. How disgusting can human beings be! The Jews I despise for their narrow-mindedness, their self-righteousness, the incredibly bizarre sense that these cave men who are my parents and relatives have somehow gotten of their superiority—but when it comes to tawdriness and cheapness, to beliefs that would shame even a gorilla, you simply cannot top the goyim. What kind of base and brainless schmucks are these people to worship somebody who, number one, never existed, and number two, if he did, looking as he does in that picture, was without a doubt The Pansy of Palestine. In a pageboy haircut, with a Palmolive complexion—and wearing a gown
that I realize today must have come from Fredericks of Hollywood! Enough of God and the rest of that garbage! Down with religion and human groveling! Up with socialism and die dignity of man! Actually, why I should be visiting the Girardi home is not so as to lay their daughter—please God!—but to evangelize for Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor. Of course! For who are the Girardis if not the people, on whose behalf, for whose rights and liberties and dignities, I and my brother-in-law-to-be wind up arguing every Sunday afternoon with our hopelessly ignorant elders (who vote Democratic and think Neanderthal), my father and my uncle. If we don’t like it here, they tell us, why don’t we go back to Russia where everything is hunky-dory? “You’re going to turn that kid into a Communist,” my father warns Morty, whereupon I cry out, “You don’t understand! All men are brothers!” Christ, I could strangle him on the spot for being so blind to human brotherhood!

  Now that he is marrying my sister, Morty drives the truck and works in the warehouse for my uncle, and in a manner of speaking, so do I: three Saturdays in a row now I have risen before dawn to go out with him delivering cases of Squeeze to general stores off in the rural wilds where New Jersey joins with the Poconos. I have written a radio play, inspired by my master, Norman Corwin, and his celebration of V-E Day, On a Note of Triumph (a copy of which Morty has bought me for my birthday). So the enemy is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse; take a bow, G.I., take a bow, little guy … Just the rhythm alone can cause my flesh to ripple, like the beat of the marching song of the victorious Red Army, and the song we learned in grade school during the war, which our teachers called “The Chinese National Anthem.” “Arise, ye who refuse to be bond-slaves, with our very flesh and blood”—oh, that defiant cadence! I remember every single heroic word!—“we will build a new great wall!” And then my favorite line, commencing as it does with my favorite word in the English language: “In-dig-na-tion fills the hearts of all of our coun-try-men! A-rise! A-rise! A-RISE!”